War: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, April 2024

The more I love humanity in general the less I love man in particular.
—Fyodor Dostoevsky, The Brothers Karamazov

From 1914 to the present, between one hundred and eight million and one hundred sixty million people died in war. War between capitalist powers but also war between capitalist powers and socialist nations—Soviet bloc, Red China, the Third World—has produced mass human casualties. I’m a socialist who believes such forms of socialism were never really socialist. So-called “real existing socialism” has largely failed and we now live primarily in a capitalist world run by an international bourgeoisie.

According to the Left, war is only one of the many evils that capitalism causes. Genocide, exploitation, poverty, ableism, ageism, classism, racism, anti-semitism, sexism, homophobia—the list is long. When socialism is achieved—when the stateless, classless, global human community is attained—all the above evils of capitalism will disappear. Yeah, right! I’m a socialist, but I’m not an idiot. To illustrate the absurdity of that claim, let’s consider just the prevalence of war.

But first some Marxism.

The classic Renaissance periods of human history (Ancient/Medieval/Modern) was augmented by the Scottish Enlightenment model of human development (Hunting/Pastoral/Agricultural/Commercial Societies). Marx then propounded a stage theory of economic development where humanity passed through “modes of production,” each mode a combination of productive forces and social/technical relations of production. Beginning with classless primitive communism, class societies moved from ancient through feudal to capitalist stages, finally advancing to classless advanced communism. Each class-oriented mode of production is defined by how labor was organized, starting with the slave societies of ancient Greece and Rome, moving through serf-based feudalism, finally reaching capitalist societies reliant on workers. I consider this Marxist schema vulgar, riven with anomalies like the “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism,” and thus needs to be taken as descriptive rather than prescriptive.

Now let’s consider the mortality figures from a selection of wars throughout history.

The ancient Roman civil wars (Servile and Social) cost between 3 and 5 million lives. The feudal Chinese Three Kingdom War had a death toll of 36 to 40 million. The purely capitalist first World War produced over 40 million military and civilian casualties. The mixed capitalist/socialist second World War drestroyed between 70 and 85 million lives. But the winner is the rise of the Mongol Empire. The Mongol invasions/conquests of Asia and Europe in the 13th and 14th centuries combined various factors; aspects of “Asiatic mode of production/Oriental despotism” (centralized state structure), feudalism (decentralized fief system), and ancient labor practices (enslavement of Turkish and Slavic peoples), resulting in subjugating almost 25% of the world’s inhabitants. Between 40 and 70 million people were slaughtered across Eurasia in a population loss that may have affected up to 11% of the world’s population. Besides gruesome military battles and sieges, the Mongols practiced wholesale massacres, intentional famines, forced migrations, crude biological warfare, genocide and androcide.

At least one billion humans have died in war throughout all of human history, and that figure could easily be doubled without exaggeration. The horrors of class-based human civilization with regard to warfare alone makes the allure—the utopian fantasy—of classless post-capitalist egalitarian communism obvious. Marx’s “mode of production” theory, in bookending class-based civilization with primitive communism and advanced communism, in turn fueled the primitivist myth that our Paleolithic ancestors were peaceful, ecological, goddess-worshipping hunter/gatherers uncorrupted by civilization and science. Put forward by John Zerzan and Paul Shepard, it simplistically reprises Romantic era fantasies of the primeval paradise and the noble savage.

Marx and Engels asserted that Paleolithic humans existed in a state of “primitive communism,” a relatively classless, communalist social order of nomadic hunter/gatherer bands and tribes. These egalitarian societies practiced mutual exchange and resource sharing. Marshall Sahlins argues that such a social order was the original affluent society in which people worked as little as ten to twenty hours a week in order to survive. Such societies were affluent because their members were content with little in the material sense, enjoying more leisure and working less than did members of modern society. But when hunter/gatherer communities experienced environmental drought and famine they tended to become culturally/physically extinct.

Human beings existed for hundreds of thousands of years as nomadic tribal hunter/gatherer societies, “over 99 percent of the time that the genus Homo has existed on the planet, about two million years.” This primitive communism wasn’t a “utopia of basket-weaving peace lovers” (per Dean Burnett) by any stretch. Our early ancestors may not have engaged in the organized lethal violence we call warfare until they developed sedentary agricultural societies, but there is evidence that intergroup aggression often occurred between hunter/gatherer bands in the form of raids to steal foodstuffs and perhaps women. (Engels’ thesis in The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State that primitive matriarchies were overthrown by patriarchal coups intent on securing male lineages for children is inaccurate. Apparently, women have often been considered “spoils.”) This includes observations that modern hunter/gatherers engage in ritual team fighting games to learn and exercise the coordination and motor skills needed for lethal raiding and warfare, suggesting there are elements of sport and pleasure to such homicidal behavior. Then and now, a particularly deadly raid against a small, culturally or ethnically distinct tribe might result in its complete annihilation. In other words, primitive genocide.

There are disputed theories that genocidal violence was used to wipe out the Neanderthals. More evidence of war exists for late Paleolithic massacres at Jebel Sahaba, Sudan, and Nataruk, Kenya, when scenes of human violence started to be depicted in cave paintings. Warfare seems to have begun in earnest with the transition from nomadic to sedentary societies between the Paleolithic and Neolithic periods.

The problem with anthropological and archeological theories regarding Paleolithic warfare is that there’s virtually no physical evidence pro or con. To repeat, there’s almost no proof for or against primitive warfare. Those who find the lack of evidence an affirmation that hunter/gatherer societies were overwhelmingly peaceful dispute those researchers who would use ethnographic comparisons with historical or modern hunter/gatherer societies to speculatively fill in the gaps of prehistory, accusing the latter of cultural bias. Those who contend that egalitarian Paleolithic hunter/gatherers were peaceful argue that most lethal disputes were personal and directed toward particular individuals, not group versus group conflicts that amounted to raids and blood feuds if not low-level warfare. Hunter/gatherers, being mobile, tended to move to avoid threats and conflict. Only when natural disaster, resource scarcity, territorial impingement or overpopulation put stress on hunter/gatherer societies did they resort to intergroup aggression and killings which on occasion escalated into raids, blood feuds and warfare. To insist that nomadic hunter/gatherers were warlike is to postulate without proof, on gut instinct or from an agenda. Few scientists doubt that prehistoric humans were incapable of murder. What is in question was whether individual, personal killings could transmute into intergroup warfare. Absence of evidence unfortunately is not evidence of absence.

Marx postulated a basic human nature, what he called species-being. Humans are social animals. Their essence, their nature, is in reality “an ensemble of social relations.” To change the totality of social relations is to change that essence. And to change the mode of production is to change aspects of human nature. Some forms of social behavior—language, music, work, play, intoxication, transcendence—seem to have endured throughout human existence—history and prehistory. I’m afraid that war may be one of those persistent social relations, part of the social panoply that constitutes human nature even during Paleolithic times.

This also means that if and when capitalism is overthrown not all the social ills attributed to capitalism will necessarily be eliminated. I purposefully limited the discussion to war so that the whole range of evils (exploitation, racism, sexism, et al) associated with class societies will not also have to be considered. But if war is a fact of human nature, part of classless primitive communism, will war manifest through advanced classless communism? Certainly the countries practicing “real existing socialism” engaged in warfare with each other (USSR/China, China/Vietnam, Vietnam/Cambodia, etc). Then contemplate the war games practiced by the fictional ecological utopia in Ernest Callenbach’s Ecotopia as a way to avoid war.

Whereas I like and love certain human beings individually, I fear and despise humanity collectively and in the abstract. Thus I reverse Dostoevsky’s literary observation. I’ve become more cynical of humanity the older I get. In a previous column discussing alien life and the Drake Equation, I mentioned the “Great Filter Hypothesis” as to why intelligent life might not naturally arise or sustain itself for any length of time. One possibility is that the evolution of intelligence cosmically might go hand in hand with self-destruction so that as life becomes more sentient it becomes more suicidal. Human history seems to bear out that hypothesis as we humans increasingly destroy our own species and the world.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
“Theses on Feuerbach” by Karl Marx (1845)
The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State by Friedrich Engels (1884)
Les hommes fossiles by M. Boule (1920)
“Social Stratification in Polynesia: a Study of Adaptive Variation in Culture” (1954) and “Stone Age Economics” (1974) by Marshall Sahlins
War Before Civilization by Lawrence Keeley (1996)
The Ecological Indian by Shepard Krech (1999)
The Myth of Matriarchal Prehistory by Cynthia Eller (2000)
How War Began: The Myth of the Peaceful, Noble Savage by Keith Otterbein (2004)
Reinvention of Primitive Society by Adam Kuper (2005)
The Origins of War: Violence in Prehistory by Guilaine and Zammit (2005)
Constant Battles: Why We Fight by Le Blanc and Register (2013)
War, Peace, and Human Nature edited by Douglas P. Fry (2013)
“Inter-group violence among early Holocene hunter-gatherers of West Turkana, Kenya” by M. Mirazón Lahr et al (Nature volume 529, 1-20-2016)
“Hominin interbreeding and the evolution of human variation” by Kwang Hyun Ko (Journal of Biological Research-Thessaloniki, 2016)
“Coalitional Play Fighting and the Evolution of Coalitional Intergroup Aggression” by Sugiyama, Mendoza, White & Sugiyama (Nature, 6-29-2018)
https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2009/11/01/long-live-war-whats-left-november-2009-mrr-319/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2021/12/01/alien-life-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-december-2021/https://leftyhooligan.wordpress.com/2022/07/01/left-of-the-left-lefty-hooligan-whats-left-july-2022/

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Heart of a heartless world: “Lefty” Hooligan, “What’s Left?”, March 2023

To be sure, some of the language adopted by Marxists — e.g., heresies, dogma, sects, orthodoxy, schisms — is clearly borrowed from theological disputes. Furthermore, the recantations made by ex-communists at times seems to lend credence to this view.
Ross Laurence Wolfe, The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus

For the life of me, I don’t know how we managed before the internet.

Of course there was the 1960s underground press scene with hundreds of local papers around the country. I regularly picked up copies of the Los Angeles Free Press, the Berkeley Barb, and the mother of all alternative newspapers, the Village Voice, from Anne Chicoine’s Books. Anne was an expatriate New Yorker who ran a literary bookshop in a shotgun storefront along Main Street when I lived in Ventura, California. She smoked a meerschaum pipe, spoke with a Manhattan accent, and gave me suggestions for books to read from her wall-to-wall floor-to-ceiling bookshelves. She kept the alternative papers with the underground comics in the revolving newspaper racks at the front of the store.

“So what’s this?” I asked, pointing to the Credentials of Ministry from the Universal Life Church with her name on it beside the cash register.

“I’m a fully ordained minister,” Anne smirked. “I got my minister’s license from a classified ad in the Freep for ten bucks. You need a wedding, baptism or funeral done I’m your gal. All perfectly legal apparently.”

I got my minister’s certificate soon thereafter. Kirby J. Hensley’s ULC and his pay-to-play ministry licenses were beginning to be tested legally in the early 1970s with a 1974 ruling in “Cramer v Commonwealth” granting the organization a religious tax exemption. By then Hensley had ordained over a million ministers. Whether the UCL’s license constitutes a fraudulent religious affiliation for tax avoidance purposes remains a contested issue. Whether or not a supposed religious organization is due a tax exemption is a matter of “church and state” in that America’s religion has always been the almighty dollar.

ULC’s airy-fairy motto is “Do that which is right,” a blanket ethics that covered Christians, Jews, Buddhists, Hindus, Sikhs, Wiccans, pagans, atheists and whoever else. It’s a vanilla version of Aleister Crowley’s rule for his Abbey of Thélème that “Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of The Law.” I bounced between atheism and agnosticism in those days so I got the minister’s license on a lark. I was just coming out of a six-month stint as an evangelical Christian after having been a Catholic through my sacramental Confirmation. I would go on to experiment with Unitarianism, Baháʼí-ism and Zen Buddhism, and I continue to have an ongoing interest in spirituality today.

That’s because throughout my life I’ve had what we called in the 1960s “spiritual experiences” produced by contemplative walking, religious conversion, meditative practices, and psychedelic drug usage. I never considered these experiences to be interventions from some spiritual being or realm outside myself. They were all the result of my individual biochemistry, but this isn’t a matter of crude materialist interaction. At base Aristotle’s expression that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts” holds true in that, minimally, the accumulated parts need to be augmented by the relationships between those parts. Dialectics emerged in the nineteenth century while gestalt and synergy arose in the twentieth century all to describe the interaction or cooperation between elements of a totality to account for it being greater than the simple sum of those parts.

William James gave a series of lectures to categorize the different spiritual encounters humans have had across the world throughout time which were compiled into the book The Varieties of Religious Experience in 1902. Two common elements that seem to constitute universalities, are the mystical sensation of transcending the ego and of communion. Every hippie worth their salt in the 1960s had a bottle of Dr. Bronner’s Magic Soap with those text-heavy labels that read like schizophrenic word salad but which always started with the declaration “All-One!” The spiritual sense of communion, of belonging to some greater whole or that “I contain multitudes” as Walt Whitman announced in his poem Song of Myself, is paralleled by what those of us who took psychedelics in the 1960s called “ego death.” The drugs forced a temporary loss of a sense of self which we equated with Eastern religions that promoted negating the individual’s attachment to a separate sense of ego through various spiritual practices. James chose to limit his studies of mystical moments to direct, immediate religious experiences, explicitly excluding any examination of religious theology or institutions. Several of my mystical experiences occurred in the context of churches and other religious organizations that had extremely negative theologies and religious practices.

I encountered plenty of heresy, dogma, sectarianism, orthodoxy and schism during my brief involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ at Ventura Community College in 1970. The friend who converted me, upon expressing frustration at the rabid leftwing bent to my born-again Christianity, dismissed my politics and my friendship by insisting that I forget about all worldly concerns and simply study my bible. When our campus was invaded by a Children of God “commune” whose “hippie” members denounced “The System,” predicted the rise of a totalitarian One World Government under the Anti-Christ’s brutal dictatorship, and preached its revolutionary overthrow by Jesus in the Second Coming, my orthodox Christian friends were understandably confused. They considered themselves frontline shock troops against evil, so when the Hare Krishnas periodically showed up to dance and chant at our school the Christians confronted the saffron-robed dolts as demon-possessed. During one debate when a Krishna pointed to the chest of that same Christian friend to indicate that some fanciful Hindu deity resided in his heart, my friend yelled vehemently back that “There’s no devil in me whatsoever, no sir!” That was the first time I experienced the evangelical tendency to profess a love for Israel and the Jewish people while simultaneously expressing vile anti-Semitic insults against Jews. Christian Zionists consider Jews as both “globalist devils” and an eschatological tripwire for the End Times in which the Second Coming of Jesus restores a fully resurrected Israel to its rightful place as a religious and cultural beacon in the community of nations. It’s the metaphor of “Christ’s long suffering bride,” both abused and redeemed.

After community college, I eventually started reading Karl Marx, who wrote that:

Religious suffering is, at one and the same time, the expression of real suffering and a protest against real suffering. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world, and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.

This tempered, dialectical understanding of human faith runs counter to the actual history of religion—the intolerance, oppression, sectarianism, mayhem, torture, slaughter, mass murder, and warfare that is SOP for religion. Doris Lessing made a similarly balanced evaluation of Marxism when she wrote:

I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and subdividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds. But it was an attempt.

Religion is far and away the more destructive ideology when compared to Marxism. There are no “holy wars” between branches of socialism unlike the Catholic/Protestant or the Christian/Moslem bloodbaths that stain history and the present. I don’t accept the capitalist insult that socialism is an odious form of religion (Ludwig von Mises) or the bourgeois atheist’s claim that Christianity or Judaism are fundamentally socialistic in nature (Ayn Rand). Instead I’ll briefly touch on Marxism’s eschatological tendency per Raymond Aron to see the working class as humanity’s “collective savior… that is, the class elected through suffering for the redemption of humanity.” “One of the most common charges leveled at Marxists is that, for all their atheistic pretensions, they retain a quasi-religious faith in the revolutionary dispensation of working class dictatorship,” according to Ross Laurence Wolfe in his salient essay “Demonology of the working class”. “’It’s become an almost compulsory figure of speech to refer to Marxism as a Church,’ observed the French literary critic Roland Barthes in 1951. […] Socialism, however, is not about worshiping but rather abolishing the worker.”

The problems of Marxist “theology” aside, my time in various socialist organizations and movements acquainted me with a number of similar “spiritual” moments. There are analogous experiences of egolessness, communion, and community to be had on the Left compared with religion. Referring again to Wolfe’s brilliant essay, I reveled in the “mad rush” of direct action and the “demonic character” of revolution. Certainly the “Faustian dimension of Marxist thought”—his exaltation of the proletariat as “not just Promethean but Luciferian”—appealed to me viscerally. Wolfe’s lengthy discussion of Marxism’s deification of the proletariat versus the need to abolish the working class is well worth reading in full.

SOURCES:
Personal recollections
A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, “Introduction” by Karl Marx (1844)
Song of Myself by Walt Whitman (1855)
The Varieties of Religious Experience by William James (1902)
The Golden Notebook, “Introduction” by Doris Lessing (1971)
“Demonology of the working class” by Ross Laurence Wolfe, The Charnel-House: From Bauhaus to Beinhaus (2016)

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Sectarianism or The Truth Will Set You Free: “What’s Left?” May 2017, MRR #408

It’s a classic picture; an iconic, grainy, black-and-white photo of Fidel Castro addressing an unseen crowd, flanked by Ernesto “Che” Guevara and Camilo Cienfuegos. Three handsome Latin men in the ultimate romantic revolutionary photo op. Within ten months of the Cuban revolution’s triumph in January, 1959, Cienfuegos died under somewhat mysterious circumstances amid rumors that Castro had him eliminated because he was too popular. And nearly nine years later, Che was hunted down and killed in the jungles of Bolivia under CIA direction, having been reluctant to return to Cuba after Castro made public Guevara’s secret “farewell letter” surrounded by rumors of a falling out between the two.

With Fidel’s death in November of last year, the top three leaders of the Cuban Revolution are now all dead. Fidel continued to smoke Cuban cigars and drink Cuban rum until a few months before his demise at 90 years of age. Supporters of the Cuban revolution considered this symbolic of the resiliency of the socialist project while its enemies of its doddering senility. But this isn’t yet another case of Schrödinger’s cats and quantum simultaneity. Marxism and the Left are definitely on the ropes. This month I’ll discuss the first of a handful of principal issues troubling the Left, without much hope of transcending any of them.

SECTARIANISM
OR THE TRUTH WILL SET YOU FREE

Sectarianism figures as the most overt and persistent problem on the Left. The term originally refers to religious conflicts where it was important to establish that you had a direct line to the almighty, and therefore a need to refute, persecute, or even kill anyone who disputed your claim. The idea here is that you and your group of fellow believers have the truth and those who disagree should be subject to everything from scorn and contempt to terror and death because they’re wrong. The claim to religious truth covers not just major differences like the nature of god (one indivisible vs three-in-one vs multiple, transcendent vs imminent) but also to minor matters like whether to make the sign of the cross with two vs three fingers or to baptize by dunking an individual’s head first vs feet first.

But religion certainly doesn’t have a monopoly on claims to the truth. Politics rivals religion in the acrimony it often generates, and ranks with money and sex as one of the top four topics that shouldn’t be discussed in polite company. Political sectarians certainly parallel their religious counterparts in emphasizing the absolute truth of their principles over all others, making every minor disagreement into the basis for fundamental differences, seeing the deadliest of enemies in their closest rivals, putting purity of dogma over tactical advantage, refusing to compromise or alter their aims, and proclaiming their pride at being against the stream. To be fair, real differences do exist between groups and within organizations. Anarchists and Marxists differ fundamentally on the nature and use of state power (dominant autonomous institution to be smashed vs instrumentality of class rule to be seized). Social democrats and Leninists disagree essentially on the organization and role of the political party (mass democratic party vs vanguard party). Given such fundamental differences, political conflicts and opposition are bound to occur when a common action or program is undertaken. But it’s important to define those differences that actually make a difference instead of always seeing fundamental differences where none exist.

On the Left, Marxism exacerbates the problem of sectarianism because of what Frederich Engels called the “theoretical expression of the proletarian movement, scientific Socialism.” It is unclear whether Karl Marx himself had such a rigid understanding of his doctrine. While he concurred with Engels in differentiating his socialism from the utopianism of prior socialist thinkers, Marx was by no means as crude or mechanistic in its application to the world of his day. What’s more, Marx valued the correctness of his doctrine’s methodology far more than he did the correctness of its conclusions. Science is based on statements of fact like “1 + 1 = 2,” and so to claim that “1 + 1 = 3” for instance is not just wrong, it’s unscientific. If socialism is a scientific doctrine, then statements by Marxist organization A that “the Assad regime in Syria is objectively anti-imperialist” are considered scientific fact. But what if Marxist organization B proclaims that “the Assad regime in Syria is objectively counterrevolutionary?” Just as 1 + 1 cannot be simultaneously 2 and 3, Assad’s regime in Syria cannot be simultaneously objectively anti-imperialist and counterrevolutionary. Since both Marxist organizations A and B each claim to rely on scientific socialism to arrive at their contradictory conclusions, at least one of these statements must be objectively false.

Aside from the quantum physics fringe, science just doesn’t work that way. Neither political formulation may be right, but someone certainly must be wrong; a sentiment that fuels the sectarian urge.

For Engels, the term scientific essentially meant dialectic. There is much debate about whether Marx subscribed wholeheartedly to Hegelian dialectics, or if his methodology was more complex. Whatever the case, subsequent Marxists like Lenin, Trotsky, and Mao considered Marxism to be fundamentally dialectical. And Mao entertained an open notion of dialectics where contradictions endlessly self-generated until certain contradictions were considered eternal. “Does ‘one divide into two’ or ‘two fuse into one?’ This question is a subject of debate in China and now here. This debate is a struggle between two conceptions of the world. One believes in struggle, the other in unity. The two sides have drawn a clear line between them and their arguments are diametrically opposed. Thus, you can see why one divides into two.” (Free translation from the Red Flag, Peking, September 21, 1964) This is also a conception of the world as endless split and schism, of sectarianism run amok. Little wonder that the Maoist New Communist Movement in the United States at its height in the 1970s rivaled Trotskyism for ever-proliferating, constantly infighting groupuscules. It’s no coincidence that Monty Python’s film “Life of Brian,” with its clever skit of the People’s Front of Judea vs the Judean People’s Front, came out in 1979.

The “one divide into two” quote came from a pamphlet called “The Anti-Mass: Methods of Organization for Collectives” which first appeared in 1970-71. It was called a “moldy soup of McLuhanism, anarchism, William Burroughs, Maoism, and ‘situationism’.” The real Situationists of “Contradiction” called out the fake “situationists” of “Anti-Mass” for taking “a firm, principled position within the spectacle, titillating jaded movement post-graduates with neo-Maoist homilies and Madison Avenue salesmanship.”

And so it went. Trotskyism, Maoism, and Situationism were perhaps the most sectarian tendencies on the Left, but Leftist sectarianism was by no means confined to them. With the defeat of the labor movement and the collapse of Leninist regimes in the twentieth century, we’ve come to a crisis of Marxism specifically and of the Left in general.

Increasingly marginalized revolutionaries sought to break with the senescent Left after 1991 and proffered innovations to its theory and politics in order to salvage what they could of Marxism. In the twenty-first century, this has amounted to rearguard discussions of insurrectionism, communization, Agamben, and social war. To quote Benjamin Noys, the “mixing-up of insurrectionist anarchism, the communist ultra-left, post-autonomists, anti-political currents, groups like the Invisible Committee, as well as more explicitly ‘communizing’ currents, such as Théorie Communiste” is what can be called today’s Social War tendency. In retreat and lacking agency, visions narrow. Revolution becomes insurrection. Communism becomes communizing. The amorphous eclecticism of the Social War tendency offers not “a fresh new perspective for Marxist politics but a repeat of Kropotkinist and Sorelian critiques of Marxism with more theoretical sophistication” according to Donald Parkinson. In other words, more bad politics. And part of that bad politics is sectarianism. Witness the incessant political bickering between Tiqqun, Gilles Dauvé, and Théorie Communiste for starters, which no doubt sounds much more elegant in French.

Doris Lessing wrote in her introduction to “The Golden Notebook”: “I think it is possible that Marxism was the first attempt, for our time, outside the formal religions, at a world-mind, a world ethic. It went wrong, could not prevent itself from dividing and sub-dividing, like all the other religions, into smaller and smaller chapels, sects and creeds. But it was an attempt.” Perhaps sectarianism on the Left is inevitable as Lessing suggests. It can be contained and controlled however, something that is necessary to promote solidarity.

As a postscript, it is claimed that opportunism is the opposite of sectarianism because opportunists readily adapt their principles to circumstances, minimize the significance of internal disputes, consider even enemies as “the lesser evil,” place tactical advantage over adherence to principles, willingly compromise, and gladly follow the mainstream. Whereas sectarians adamantly insist on their uniqueness, purity, and autonomy, opportunists willingly give up all three. Sectarianism insists on an uncompromising identity while opportunism readily dissolves itself into the greater movement. So while sectarians remain a constant pain-in-the-ass as long as they exist, opportunists happily sell out and fade away. Thus the problem of sectarianism persists while the problem of opportunism takes care of itself by simply evaporating.

No apology necessary (or offered): “What’s Left?” December 2014, MRR #379

THE LEFT BEHIND LEFT

We have met the enemy and he is us.

Pogo (Walt Kelly), comic strip

We called it “The System” back in the day. After I got politics in 1968, I considered capitalism and the State equally destructive of human individuality and community, and that working people would be able to overthrow both to bring about socialism. My world view didn’t change much as I evolved from anarchism to left communism over the decades that followed. I identified the working class as the social class with the revolutionary agency to overthrow capitalism and the State and realize communism, a bit more nuanced than the political debates of the 60s where Marxists argued that capitalism was the principle enemy while anarchists argued that it was the State.

Things got a whole lot more complicated in the 70s, 80s, and beyond. The New Left splintered into the New Communist Movement, various nationalist movements, the women’s movement, the gay movement, et al, even as we pretended that a bunch of ineffective little groupings amounted to one big ineffectual Movement. Alternative analyses arose where patriarchy was the enemy and women the revolutionary agent, or white supremacy was the enemy and people of color the revolutionary agent, and so on. Eventually, it became necessary to define The System, after bell hooks, as the “white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist, imperialist, statist” enemy; a rather clunky accumulation of oppressions that did little to advance any kind of radical struggle other than to appease various and sundry wannabe revolutionaries.

I will take on the issue of revolutionary agency, as well as of the realistic capacities of any such agency, in a future column. For now, it should be clear that the implied parity between forms of oppression entailed by the phrase The “white supremacist, patriarchal, heteronormative, capitalist, imperialist, statist” System is bullshit. Every group in radical circles singles out one form of oppression as primary, with all others consigned to secondary status. Radical people of color and their allies see white supremacy as THE enemy. Radical feminists and their allies contend that patriarchy is THE enemy. And so it goes. Such was the case when Marxists argued that capitalism was THE enemy, or when anarchists proclaimed that the State was THE enemy.

I’m happy to discuss and debate which form of oppression is paramount, even to argue whether all are equally valid, and learn from or adjust my analysis accordingly. Unfortunately, the quality of discussion and debate in this sad excuse for a Movement is abysmal. I’m not sure whether it is merely dogmatism and sectarianism run rampant, or the consequence of postmodernism’s effects on our capacity for critical thinking and dialogue, but reason and analysis seem to be in short supply whereas rational study and articulate argument have become lost arts. I won’t go into all the gory details of my latest run-in with internecine anarchist idiocy. You can google that for yourself. For the record, I’m utterly disdainful of the thoroughly isolated, completely fragmented, pathetic joke of a so-called Movement. Nowadays, I no longer claim anything left of the Left, although my sympathies remain gauchist. Instead, lets discuss two general topics of interest.

THE MYTH OF FACT CHECKING

Memory is a motherfucker.

Bill Ayers, Fugitive Days: Memoirs of an Anti-War Activist

This is one of my favorite quotes. Ayers makes the point that many of the memories he claims are fact or true are actually not that at all, but are based on recollections fogged by time, as well as a “blurring of details” where “[m]ost names and places have been changed, many identities altered, and the fingerprints wiped away.” There is plenty of scientific evidence for the unreliability of personal memory and eyewitness testimony. This plus my experience with writing and reading history, where there are invariably numerous versions of the same historical narrative, has made me cynical of words like “fact” and “truth.” I won’t go so far as Nietzsche’s famous quote that “there are no facts, only interpretations,” but I will argue that there are no facts, only evidence for facts. The only way we can establish a fact, or for that matter a truth, is through verifiable, empirical evidence for that fact or truth.

Fact checking then is not a matter of tallying up the facts, but of compiling and weighing the evidence for the facts. In my experience, two things often stand in the way of honest fact checking when it comes to current events. First, there are plenty of people claiming that “they were there” at any given notorious incident, whether or not they actually were. And second, of those individuals who come forth and claim to be present when such incidents take place, most are decidedly less than forthcoming about the what, when, where and how of their supposed eyewitness experiences despite their willingness to loudly pass judgment on the why.

As for history, I wasn’t around for either the Russian revolution or the Spanish civil war. Yet I’ve scoured all the available history and primary sources, the evidence if you will, for the facts and lessons to be drawn from these historical events. In the process, I’ve noticed that new evidence is always being discovered, and thus new facts are being determined, and new histories are being written.

DUALISM VS DIALECTIC

When the Buddha comes, you will welcome him; when the devil comes, you will welcome him.

Shunryu Suzuki, “No Dualism,” Zen Mind, Beginner’s Mind

Don’t you know there ain’t no devil, there’s just God when he’s drunk.

Tom Waits, “Heartattack and Vine”

Finally, there is the tendency to reduce everything to a Manichean good vs evil view of the world, inherited from our Judeo-Christian society. Marx made it clear that capitalism is a system of exploitation and oppression, but also an all encompassing social relationship in which both capitalists and workers are intimately involved. Capitalist and worker are both oppressed by capitalism, although by no means equally so. Thus, Marx was against vulgar Marxists who label capitalists as purely evil and workers as entirely good. White supremacy is a form of oppression, which does not mean that white people are evil and people of color are good. Patriarchy is a form of oppression, which does not mean that men are evil and women are good.

Even the penchant for naming an enemy is problematic. To do so is to suggest an evil that must be countered by the good. I have been sitting zazen for the past three plus years, trying to wrap my mind around the Buddhist idea of non duality. Non duality seems the perfect antidote to good vs evil thinking, except that it propounds paradox at every turn. Strive for non-striving, let go of letting go, achieve non-achievement; Buddhism is chock full of such paradoxes. These are consciously enigmatic contradictions akin to the famous koans of Zen Buddhism’s Rinzai school, meant not to supply answers but to provoke enlightenment. Combine that with Buddhism’s own recent demonstration of good vs evil dualistic behavior, illustrated by the murderous agitation of rabidly anti-Muslim Buddhist monks like U Wirathu and Galagodaatte Gnanasara, and we’re back in the thick of this world’s shit.

WHAT’S LEFT?

Nobody bickers, nobody stalls or debates or splinters.

John Sayles, “At the Anarchists’ Convention”

In John Sayles’ piquant short story, “At the Anarchists’ Convention,” cantankerous personal squabbling and bitter political sectarianism among the scruffy convention participants are momentarily set aside when all in attendance unite against a hotel manager who tries to kick the Convention out of its rented room due to double booking. This whimsical tale ends when the convention of geriatric has-been red-flag wavers dedicated to lost causes erect a barricade, stand together, link arms, and sing “We Shall Not Be Moved.”

The notion that The Movement is something we should rally around against a common enemy reeks of just such sentimentality and nostalgia. That this degenerate offspring of what was called The Left is all but worthless goes without saying.

So, call me a fascist or a racist, or label my thinking white supremacist or Eurocentric. I write my columns knowing full well that some people will dismiss what I say as defensive, abstract, condescending, or self-serving. For those of you who consider me an anachronistic, eccentric old school commie, here’s my upraised middle finger.